Complete Multi Vitamins

What should you look for in a complete multi vitamin if you are interested in a natural version?

This guide will cover the basics, including

1) The raw ingredients – Go whole food or go home
2) Processing – Avoid the incineration method and
3) Binders and Fillers – What to look out for

Let’s take a look at each in turn

Raw Ingredients

The first thing to look for in a high-quality multivitamin is if it comes from a whole-food source.

I was very surprised to find out that most vitamin C, for example, was not from an orange or grapefruit but rather manufactured in a lab.

The ascorbic acid was isolated from refined cornstarch and did not contain rutin and organic copper, which normally occur in the natural vitamin C complex.

To read more in particular about vitamin C, take a look at our vitamin C information page

The start of a great multivitamin begins with ingredients made from whole foods, but what happens next is just as important.

Processing

Unfortunately, what happens next in a lot of the manufacturing processes is that the raw ingredients are then flash-heated to reduce them to a powder format.

This process is the cheapest way to manufacture the vitamin, since it takes up very little production time. However, this near-incineration of the materials strips some of the nutritional value from the inputs.

A much better substitute is a slow-drying or even sun-drying process, which is more time consuming and expensive, but retains more of the nutrients in the vitamin.

And yet, there is still another pitfall of buying a complete multi vitamin.

Binders and Fillers

Up to 80% of the multi vitamins on the market are made up of filler materials like maltodextrin, which are cheap ingredients added to “bulk up” the product so the hapless consumer thinks they are getting better value for money.

Watch out for fillers like this, as well as various binders that are used to keep the materials in tablet form and serve no nutritional purpose.

You can usually recognise a binder by the fact that you don’t know what it is.

If there is a strange chemical name in the ingredients list it is probably a binder or a filler that isn’t adding value to the product at all.

Summary

If you follow the buying guidelines above you will get far better value for money.